English & Literature

Who is Hans Stark from 'the Good Old Days': The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders and what is their importance?

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Stark joined the SS at the age of sixteen in 1937. He was thereafter stationed at Sachsenhaused, Buchenwald, and Dachau. He served in the political department at Auschwitz in 1940. From late 1941 to early 1942 he was on leave to finish his school education, and through early 1943 he studied law. After the war he studied agriculture and from 1953 to 1959 taught at various agricultural schools. He was arrested in 1959 and in 1965 was sentenced to ten year's detention; his sentence was unusually light because he was a juvenile during much of the time period—and hence was tried as a minor. Stark is known to have been especially brutal and delighted in murdering and tormenting women and openly admitted to having personally executed a few dozen Russian political prisoners and having personally dropped Zyklon B pellets into the gas chambers. After his release from prison in 1968, Stark returned to private life and he died in 1991 at his hometown.